In addition, long-known written histories of China are explicit about the progressive establishment of successively fewer but larger polities through repeated military conquests and the absorption of losers. Chang (1986) offers a brief summary from the work of master historian Ku Tsu-yu (AD 1624–1680), which relates how many small independent polities coalesced over time into fewer but larger entities, referring to sequent episodes when there existed in China “ten thousand states”, “three thousand states”, “eighteen hundred states”, “more than

three hundred states,” and “one hundred and thirteen states.” Chang suggests that this history MK-8776 nmr describes the gradual conquest and absorption of originally independent Late Neolithic

fortified towns into fewer and larger sociopolitical find more hegemonies that were controlled by progressively fewer and more powerful despots. By the Shang/Zhou period (3600–2200 cal BP) along the Wei and middle Yellow Rivers near modern Xi’an, regional elite rulers directed and controlled agricultural production, fostered advanced engineering and military capabilities, and increasingly employed the powerful administrative and intellectual tool of writing. Substantial cities grew as central nodes within a more and more densely settled landscape of farming villages and smaller towns, and major anthropogenic effects on the natural landscape ensued (Elvin, 2004, Keightley, 2000, Liu, 2004 and Liu and Chen, 2012). Historical texts record that a contentious period of warring among

localized states during Shang/Zhou times was transformed into an era of centrally controlled imperial rule after 221 BC, when a comparatively small region around the Wei/Yellow River nexus was politically and economically unified through the military successes of Qin Shihuangdi. Beginning his political career as the king of a small Zhou state north of modern Xi’an, he dominated six major rivals to become the first recognized Emperor to reign in China, ruling over the lesser kings of his region as head of the Qin State (221–206 BC). He is generally identified as Oxaprozin China’s first emperor, though he, in fact, ruled only a very small part of what we know as China today. As the greatly empowered and royally wealthy sovereign of a rich and densely populated region around modern Xi’an, Qin Shihuangdi fostered large-scale modifications of its natural landscape during his reign. The best-known of these projects is the Great Wall of China, which was not built all at once in Qin times, but initiated during that period by an imperial order for new construction that would knit together, into one continuous wall, a series of fortifications previously built in more localized situations by preceding Zhou rulers.